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I would respond to the prompt, but I’m having a hard time connecting with it so I’ll just ramble on about other things…[one note about the prompt though–I like Berry’s line about being joyful although you’ve considered the facts b/c I  find myself feeling super pessimistic about the Institution that is “Middlebury College”, and yet there are many joys that come along with being a part of this community]

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One of my best friends and I always talk about the (approaching) apocalypse. We can never trace how we get there, but this happens quite frequently and we’ve stayed up many nights talking about our impending doom. We’ve decided that I would be a good shelter-maker and occasional resource gatherer while she would serve as the force of protection, unafraid to kill to survive.

I realize this doesn’t seem relevant at all to food, but, one of the conclusions that my friend and I have come to is that we need to learn about food and water now if we’re going to have hope for surviving the apocalypse. If I’m being wholly truthful, this is a small reason why I decided FoodWorks would be a great way to spend my summer–I’d learn skills invaluable in the post-apocalyptic world.

Something about these exchanges that my friend and I share seems significant–we really should know about the food system, and how it all works and where it comes from–regardless of whether or not the apocalypse is nigh. I’ve been realizing in these last two weeks that I don’t know anything. And a huge portion of us (read: people) don’t know anything. We’ve stopped teaching every kid where her food comes from and how it’s made, and have grown much further from the Earth. And while our current situation might not be nearly as dire as apocalyptic times, we are all still living in deeply food-insecure times.

Coming from an urban perspective, I’d always seen environmentalism as a highly privileged interest, somehow separate from the common woman. [note: this perception also comes from living in Marin County, where the food movement and environmentalism are sometimes just for show//are closely linked with money] Which is really sad because knowledge of the environment, essential to our survival, shouldn’t be inaccessible by its very nature. The direction of the environmental movement towards food, then, is a hopeful one, and can bring the intersectional perspective that environmentalism needs in order to thrive.

Anyway, the apocalypse has me thinking about how everyone is implicated, and how we need to gain the knowledge of food required to survive. I think we should all appreciate this summer for allowing us to get our hands in the dirt and gain a deeper understanding of food. I guess when the time comes we’ll be ready

“Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”

Immediately after reading these lines the phrase “ignorance is bliss” came to my mind. Life would be much simpler and blissful not knowing many things, but it would also lack the excitement, thrill, and fulfillment that learning provides. So Berry’s lines here gave me a feeling of release. They give a sense of permission to the reader to keep learning, even if all of the information learned is not “perfect” or “good.” In our recent 5^th day event to the Slow Living Summit in Brattleboro, I had the opportunity of attending a workshop run by Vicki Robin. Robin spoke about many of her own experiences in life. In her younger days, she took on the mindset that she was going to help lead an agricultural revolution and change the world. She thought that her peers and she would be able to clear up all environmental issues before 2000. “Just a small project for the 90’s.” She described that through all of her successes and failures, she was able to learn that this project was bigger than her, her peers, and maybe even us. We need to take a responsibility in learning more and finding a solution, but we don’t have to shoulder the entire burden. I think that this is how we are able to be joyful even with all of the facts. Knowing you are not alone and there are other people to help with a solution fosters a sense of community. It creates a connection that eases your struggles and boosts your joys. I think the next two months with FoodWorks will provide that community feeling especially as we learn more about the successes and struggles of our food system.

In my own life, I like to learn about the complex and hard facts, but also take time to stop and enjoy the simple things. I think finding an equilibrium between any two things is a way to make a healthy relationship. We need to create equilibrium when pursuing a commitment to practical engagement, so that we also maintain a level of happiness. We need to create equilibrium in the relationship between the Earth, the people and all other organisms, in order to keep the planet thriving for future generations. Balance is key.

Lately, everything that I read seems to be a footnote to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So when I read the line, “Be joyful, although you have considered the facts,” I was forcefully reminded of the intersectionality of Buffy and Berry, particularly in Season 3 episode 20 when teenage Buffy (our protagonist) has her heart broken by her demon-with-a-soul ex boyfriend, Angel. Just moments before her last prom, she is brutally ripped away from the fantasy she takes solace in, that for just one night she may have a normal teenage experience, with awkward chaperones and cheesy music and a hot vampire to boot. Not only is she unhappily single, but she also learns that “hellhounds” will be attacking any and all students wearing formal wear, the cunning and vindictive plan of a recently rejected senior.

Be joyful, although you have considered the facts. These words seem to be the motto of Buffy Summers, our heroine. Even though she faces apocalypse after apocalypse, not even the end of the world can stop her and her crew from enjoying a little “prom-y fun.”

This being said, Buffy does not send her friends to prom without considering the evil hellhounds. Rather, she understands the threat posed, and looks to a way in which she and her friends can still find joy. She may arrive late to prom, without a date, with hellhound saliva covering her face, but she arrives. She greets her friends, drinks some punch, and is joyful.

We too, should consider the facts. When we look to Berry’s apocalypses in the more mundane but not less tragic deaths of the family farm and the encroachments of unsustainable agricultural practices, we must not forget to also find joy. We must eat and be merry, and attend our metaphorical proms, but not without also taking action to prevent the hellhounds of destruction. Let us move forward with purpose, shedding our ignorance as we embrace the future, whether that involve canning our own food, planting our heirloom seeds, or battling the Big Bad.

“Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts.”

As others have written, the tension in this sentence makes it really rich for interrogation. I’m really interested in the way Berry elicits joy in his readers even as he presents cold hard facts – we’ve seen this in several of his pieces, both in the poem and in the collection of essays. I also am interested in one line preceding this one:

“Expect the end of the world. Laugh.”

For me, both of these lines speak to the power to be found in deriving happiness from less-than-ideal circumstances. It is easy to be happy when everything is going swimmingly, and it is easy to be discouraged when things get tough. It is more difficult and, sometimes, more rewarding to be happy when the world is working against you. Although all experiences are important (and it’s completely valid to be happy in happy times and sad in sad times), the richest emotion is to be found in the areas of contradiction. There is no worse feeling of alienation than when you are sad and those around you are all happy, and being truly optimistic in sad times is incredibly empowering.

I think this follows in the same line of thinking that came up in our discussion about complexity last week. Ecological edges are rich and complex and diverse and important and stressful and vulnerable and unique. These are all words I would use to describe these contradictory emotions, as well. I would argue that in every field, ecology and psychology included, it is important not to shy away from complexity and contradiction and paradox, but to coax them out as much as possible to understand the really complicated ideas at play in our world and our minds.

Last summer, I had an experience that I would describe as life changing. That sounds overly grand, particularly given that the setting was a fundraiser wrapped up in a dance party for the bicycle advocacy non-profit that I had been interning with, but bear with me. I had been supervising the merch table for most of the night, but a friend took over for me as things were winding down, and I got a chance to join in the festivities. I ended up jamming with a group of folks who, as I had guessed from their slightly bizarre dress and lack of familiarity with the other guests, were not affiliated with the cyclists’ union, but were instead Swedes on a one-week visit to the United States. Between songs, one guy and I ended up discussing, of all things, labor movements and collective organization. When his friend called us out for discussing politics at a party, we  responded vehemently that such a line was artificial. The very act of dancing, of flailing and hopping and swaying, was political. We decided, in our moment of giddy weightlessness, that there could be no better way to thwart a system that at times seems hell bent on inciting despair and division than to refuse to be overwhelmed by its negativity and to instead dance. I think The Trucks capture this pretty well in the lyrics to their song “Zombie”:

You hate yourself so you try and hate me/But you can’t hate a girl who looks good dancing./It looks to me like your barely breathing/You’re half alive and your pulse is leaving/If this was the end would you die not dancing?

However, if flash in the pan girl groups aren’t your gig, Maya Angelou also speaks to the theme of joy-as-resistance in her poem “Still I Rise.” Addressing the expectations of an unnamed reader that all of the forces working against her will break her, she writes:

Did you want to see me broken?/Bowed head and lowered eyes?/Shoulders falling down like teardrops./Weakened by my soulful cries.//Does my haughtiness offend you?/Don’t you take it awful hard/’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines/Diggin’ in my own back yard.

This is not to suggest that we can laugh away subsidies programs that lock our agricultural system into toxic relationships with corporations and industrial practices. I do not mean to say that we can dance our way out of climate change. However, I do absolutely believe that both of those joyous elements – laughter and dance and communion – are critical to both sustaining and justifying activism. It is very difficult to keep tilting at windmills without bearing in mind a vision of the world that we are working towards. This is part of the reason that I am so excited about both living in Weybridge and the Fifth Day components of our curriculum; these shared spaces and times provide opportunities for those accidental moments that, while perhaps not as directly related to improving the food system as our day to day efforts, help to clarify why we are making such efforts.

TL;DR: I think that “Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts,” may be one point in which I am in complete agreement on with Berry.

“Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.” This implies that the facts are unpleasant, and many of them are. I wonder if we could ever change the situation so the facts are mostly pleasant. This would be very challenging, and it’s hard to even know where to start. As Berry writes in his excerpts in Bringing It to the Table, our conventional food system is now so deeply rooted in short-term economic “success”, “inexpensive” fossil fuels, and unnatural technological “advancements” that it seems like an overwhelming task. I think Berry means we should still manage to find happiness despite negatives. Thus, this quote both encourages and discourages me.

I also believe this joy Berry writes about is only possible if you are living in a way that aligns with your values, so you know you are trying your best not to add to these negative realities. In terms of food, I’ve been working on this by reducing the amount of meat (especially factory farmed) I eat, buying organic and local foods (when appropriate), supporting small farmers whenever possible, and not wasting. This joy also applies to other aspects of our lives as well. For example, I’ve been attempting to move away from wasteful consumerism lately, so I’m trying to purchase as much of my clothes used as possible and buy fewer unnecessary objects. When I eat and shop in this manner, I feel happier. When I eat factory farmed meat or let some lettuce go bad in the fridge before I eat it, I feel bad about it and my joy is reduced. If I can’t stick to what I know is right, how can I expect others to lead their lives in a more sustainable way either? Expecting that would be hypocritical, but at the same time nobody is perfect. It’s also challenging because wastefulness is so incorporated into our daily routines. Almost everything we buy is packaged in plastic, I have to drive to my internship (though I’m carpooling now), and throw-away objects (disposable eating utensils, paper towels, plastic bags, etc.) are rampant. It’s hard to be completely sustainable.

So, in short, for me this quote promotes pursuit of knowledge so we can live our lives well-informed and behave accordingly. It also inspires me to find joy in simple things. Not everything in life will be pleasant, but we can do what we can and look beyond this (without ignoring the problems) as well to appreciate the good things.

Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts.

What does it mean? Let’s look at “you have considered all the facts”. This seems to refer to the act of learning about issues carefully, thinking thoroughly and knowing things such as the facts, statistics, arguments, etc. Take the topic of sustainable food and agriculture for example, if one were to “consider all the facts”, he or she probably would know about things such as the rising food prices, increasing levels of soil contamination, climate change induced-droughts, overpopulation, just to name a few. So, my immediate reaction to this is, how on earth is it possible that one can “be joyful” after “considering all the facts”?

The answer seems to lie within the word “though” in this sentence. The word “though” implies to me that Wendell Berry knew that a person, who has considered all the facts, would most likely not “be joyful” (or far from being joyful, to be more accurate). With the word “though”, Wendell Berry encourages people to “be joyful” and shows people that being joyful is a choice.

My supervisor, Chef Mark Williams at Brown-Forman, has started a barrel garden at Brown-Forman to grow fresh herbs, flowers and fruits for B-F’s Executive Dining Room. The barrels were once used for holding bourbon or wine. They were cult in half and each had two drainage holes that were drilled on the side. In addition, Mark built a drip irrigation system that can be used to water the plants. In order to build and manage an organic garden at B-F, Mark had first “considered all the facts”, such as the type of plants, the size and design of the garden, and last but not least, the economic feasibility. For example, Mark knew that he wouldn’t have as much time to work in the garden (such as watering the plants) as he would like to, so he had to think of ways to manage his garden most effectively and efficiently. Therefore he built an automatic irrigation system that allows him to mange the garden without physically being at the garden.

I believe that what Wendell Berry wrote in his poem is the type of joy that can be actively chosen. When one is joyful, there is more chance that he or she can come up with ideas to solve the problems.

At first glance Wendell Berry’s pronouncement, “Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts,” may seem at once a puzzling oxymoron and at worse a call to willful blindness, ignorance of the worst order. I thought, “how dare someone consider the devastation of our current environmental crises and not work to her fullest extent possible to mitigate this damage.” I declared we all must partake in the great turning of our society to a more eco-conscious economy, an endeavor, which is difficult and meaningful, but not usually associated with joyfulness. To me, joyfulness traditionally connotes being carefree and pursuing ones source of joy, even if that source is not directly serving the furtherance of some greater cause, say the battle to pass a global climate agreement.

And then over time I began to realize the divorce in the lives among many environmentalists and often my own life, of sustainability as we apply it to our work in the environmental field and sustainability as it applies to our lives. In essence, an environmentalist cannot promote sustainable practices for soil but not apply these basic principles of environmental sustainability- slowness and receptiveness and compassion for the needs of the land and people, to her own life as it manifests in the need for adequate rest or participation in activities that are unrelated to ones environmental work, but bring her happiness in a way that enables her to sustain her joyfulness so as to avoid becoming a burnt-out activist. Just as Berry describes the unsustainability inherent in the  “separation” of the different elements of a farm and its ecological and economic environment so is the separation of our lives from the multitude of diverse activities that sustain us unsustainable. Therefore, Berry’s statement, to borrow the words of Michael Pollan in the intro, prove “perfectly obvious and completely arresting” in their insistence that joyfulness- a product of personal sustainability, is perhaps our greatest tool in light of all the facts because it allows us to accomplish and approach our work in a way that enables us to act in the direction these facts demand to the fullest extent we are able for the longest time.

Edward Abbey discusses this point beautifully:

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

“Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts.” 

In this haunting yet optimistic phrase, we’ve been instructed to be joyful, despite the dire and depressing facts our current environmental situation. This phrase resonates deeply with some of my personal beliefs.

On multiple occasions, Wendell Berry strongly asserts that the deterioration of sustainable farming culture can be directly attributed to our capitalist, industrial economy and our unshakeable dependence on fossil fuels (BITT, 60). Berry then goes on to trace the roots of this cultural phenomenon to human ambition (9).

This logic makes a lot of sense to me, but also comes with some pessimistic implications. I believe that this ‘ambition’ is an intrinsic quality of human nature. Capitalist economic structure, both domestically and internationally, links directly to man’s natural competitiveness and our perpetual search for the ‘next best thing’, the thing that is always slightly out of reach, in the interest of greed and self-improvement.

Here’s where I take issue, where I can’t find joy in the facts. By attributing our capitalist economy to human nature, in a way we are accepting that it can’t be changed. It serves as a moral crutch that rationalizes our history of abusing nature, and almost seems to set us on a one-way road to purgatory.

I grappled constantly with this issue, to no avail : How can we possibly take control to change our current situation of environmental abuse, if human nature, by definition, stays constant and cannot be changed?

Perhaps joy can be found with the addition of a little bit of faith in humanity. Perhaps my thoughts would prove more productive if I believed that human nature is capable of changing. Maybe this change shows itself in the type of work we are participating here in Louisville – by working together, we can change the paths of our collective mindset, towards a more hopeful and sustainable future.

As Wendell Berry so aptly summarizes, “Once free of [ambition], we might again go about our work and our lives with a seriousness and pleasure denied to us when we merely submit to a fate already determined by gigantic politics, economics, and technology” (9).

Lately, I have been thinking about vulnerability. Not just physical or emotional, but the unanticipated vulnerability inherent to living fully, to opening oneself to the possibility of horror and hurt and laughing despite it all.

My conscious journey along this path began just over a year ago as I sat by the fireplace in a sturdy, granite hut on the coast of a tiny tidal island in the Inner Hebrides. The wind hummed relentlessly around the stones, forcing conversation to take place a notch louder than I was accustomed. I was sharing this room with Brian, a small, wiry engineer from England who had built an impressive career before abruptly selling everything he owned to move to this community.

Twelve people, in total, live on this island along with countless sheep. Together, they make up the community of Erraid, a spiritual community affiliated with the Findhorn Foundation. I am here as escapist visitor, running from the expectations placed on me by myself and others.

I was the girl who declared her major in her first semester. The first meeting with my advisor involved the questions “where would you like to go to grad school?” and “what would you like to write your thesis on?” Really, that describes 18-year-old me perfectly—sure, determined, solid, steady, a woman with a plan.

And rather inflexible. When I decided that I couldn’t stand the thought of devoting my life to begging for funding for research that may or may not help anyone, I broke. I was lost, scared, and I felt as if I had failed because I no longer had a direction for my life that could be fit neatly into a soundbite. It was terrifying.

Through series of long, serendipitous convolutions I found myself in this state sharing a fire and a cup of tea with Brian every night for a week. Each night he coached me—don’t be rash, but trust your instincts and things will work out. Offer and ask for help liberally because that is what community is for. Each morning, I awoke to communal meditation and more tea, allowing my mind to steep in his words and the timeless spirit of the island. I left, one week later, with a new awareness of my own vulnerability. More importantly, I had begun to accept that vulnerability, even to embrace the possibility contained within.

Wendell Berry wrote “Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.”

I consider my facts: A degree of questionable utility, a difficult job market, a passion for food and agriculture offering no financial security, a collapsing global ecosystem, a climate teetering on the edge of catastrophic change. These are not happy facts. These facts do not elicit joy.

But I appreciate Berry’s words because they are a reminder that the facts are not the whole story. Particularly as we as a species, ecosystem, or global community move into increasing climatic uncertainty, Berry’s words encourage us to include joyfulness in our toolbox for survival.

Fear, doubt, blame, and all the inflexible emotions we feel as we attempt to insulate ourselves from the possibility our own disappearance don’t get us anywhere. Instead, let us be joyful in the face of our frailty. Let us bend through our world, allowing our vulnerability to open doors we would not have noticed otherwise.